Video: Tucson shooter’s lunatic tour of campus

posted at 3:45 pm on January 15, 2011 by Ed Morrissey

The Los Angeles Times published the video last night that got Tucson’s mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner kicked off the Pima Community College campus, and it’s easy to see why it made them afraid to have him return. His tour of the school includes Loughner’s commentary, which demonstrates once again that the perpetrator of six murders and the wounding of fourteen others came from a seriously diseased and incoherent mind whose only politics appear to be psychosis and schizophrenia. He talks about “torture” of students at PCC, and later “genocide” conducted there while he also talked about living on the campus as a homeless person. At one point, a teacher greets him and Loughner tells him he’s “pissed off” about the B he received in his class; afterward, he accuses the teacher of taking his “First Amendment rights.” In between, he talks about “mind control” and grammar, accuses students of being illiterate, talks about how the bookstore sells books “illegally,” and posits that we are censored by our freedom of speech.

There’s obviously no coherent political philosophy contained in Loughner’s mind. The real question this poses is why no one took action to protect a clearly delusional and paranoid Loughner from himself and others after this video came to light in September. There is no real content issue, but be aware that it’s pretty disturbing under the circumstances.

Addendum: Normally, I’d be disinclined to post this, but I think it’s relevant after the accusations leveled at grassroots conservatives and a number of politicians that their politics and expression had anything to do with this tragedy. Clearly, this was a lunatic whose issues had nothing to do with current political debate, as President Obama emphasized in his speech on Wednesday night.

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If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama in July 2008

“Here’s the problem: It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.” Obama on banks, March 2009

“I want you to argue with them and get in their face!” Barack Obama, September 2008

“We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” Obama to Latinos, October 2010

“I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!” Obama on ACORN Mobs, March 2010

“We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.“ Obama on the private sector, June 2010

We used to lock crazy ppl up to protect the public. Now we can’t (won’t). Now people die because this nutjob was wandering around society for several years in a schizophrenic haze until he finally shot a bunch of people, killing six.

I have an idea! Let’s see if MSNBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and NBC have the guts to run this rant-o-rama in its entirety uninterrupted and then let’s hear them start railing away about how this nutcase was driven by politics and vitriol rhetoric and PA-LIN!
They would all come across looking like gibbering fools at that point.

I will add this from personal experience. I work at a university. We had a warning of a student making threats.

This student was into devil worship and was trying to date mass murderers in prison and had an obsession with them. She made threats to other students she disagreed with and when she was expelled from class and the school itself she threatened to come to the local campus and murder everyone.

Well to cut this short the School gave us the womans name and nothing else no discription as it impunged “Her privacy” rights. The police were no better patrolled around for a few days but had her picture and wouldnt share it with us to protect “Her rights”.

I can see if something silly like making a one time stupid threat or being generally angry would give some protections but when it gets as bad as this you have to wonder if we have gone too far to protect the wrong people.

He talks about “torture” of students at PCC
The word “torture” over the past few years has been a word used mainly by the Left, especially in regards to the waterboarding issue. Has the Right Wing regularly used the word as much in any context?

Del Dolemonte on January 15, 2011 at 4:12 PM

He also talks about illegal wars but I agree he isnt right or left just plain nuts. I do get the sense that he parrots what he hears however. Im guessing when at the university he heard about “Bush’s illegal wars” and that stuck in his head. So in a sense his delusions were fed but he could have been watching sesame Screet and would have thought Elmo was telling him to kill.

The real question this poses is why no one [at the university or in law enforcement] took action to protect a clearly delusional and paranoid Loughner from himself and others after this video came to light in September.

So we are supposed to believe the parents did NOT see this video? Odd from every angle.

…when it gets as bad as this you have to wonder if we have gone too far to protect the wrong people.

William Amos on January 15, 2011 at 4:11 PM

The past week of BS has shown that if you are left-of-center you have extensive protection, but if you are right-of-center you are on your own. At least that is how the liberals would like it to be, and are pushing hard to have the Media prove that belief.

I will add this from personal experience. I work at a university. We had a warning of a student making threats.

This student was into devil worship and was trying to date mass murderers in prison and had an obsession with them. She made threats to other students she disagreed with and when she was expelled from class and the school itself she threatened to come to the local campus and murder everyone.

Well to cut this short the School gave us the womans name and nothing else no discription as it impunged “Her privacy” rights. The police were no better patrolled around for a few days but had her picture and wouldnt share it with us to protect “Her rights”.

I can see if something silly like making a one time stupid threat or being generally angry would give some protections but when it gets as bad as this you have to wonder if we have gone too far to protect the wrong people.

In the late 1970’s, the tree-huggers in my town here in central NH talked the town into enacting a 10 acre minimum lot size in my part of town. As a result, when the cable company wired the town, they refused to wire our neighborhood, as there were too few houses per road-mile to make it economically feasible. Even after later expansions as the years went by, the closest that cable comes to my house is 3/4 of a mile from the west, and 3/4 of a mile from the east.

And there is virtually no chance of getting high speed from my “telephone provider”. 2 years ago, Verizon sold all of their infrastructure in Vermont, NH and Maine to a bunch of Carolina grifters who call themselves “Fairpoint Communications”. Fairpoint then proceeded to screw things up royally, and filed for bankruptcy a year later.

Thanks to Reid and Pelosi’s planned destruction of the US economy over the past 4 years, I have no economical alternatives.

This video got him kicked out of school. That makes the last several days of Tea party and Palin smearing even more absurd and infuriating. Lefty’s still see it though, just read the comments at LA Times’ website.

“I’m going to be homeless because of this school” makes you wonder if his parents said he can remain living at home as long as he is going to school but since he was suspended, he was anticipating being kicked out of the house.

This is a community college — late at night, and probably on the weekend, given that the bookstore is closed. The Pima Community College Bookstore is open m-th 8-8, fri 8-5, sat 9-1. Community colleges don’t have dorms, so the constant presence of students is not a given like at a four-year college.

If you don’t believe it, fine. Why be so defensive? I think it was a contributing factor. I think gunsights, 2nd amendment remedies, and “get rid of gifford’s, fire a fully automatic m-16 with jessie kelly”, have no place in politics. Don’t you people know about introspection? “I did something wrong, I was successful with it, but it was wrong”. Should lead to: “I won’t do it again”. Also, “I did something that had unintended consequences, sorry”. Baffling.

From the comments over at the Times. Just one of many examples. Some people will never admit that this guy is just crazy.

Search youtube for “crazy kids” by Chris Rock…he makes a a great point about the media’s habit of looking for motivation in spree killers like the Columbine kids. “what ever happened to crazy?”

Again, this guy needed to have been committed. He’s so out of it. He should have been confronted and forced to undergo a psyc. exam… but unfortunately, because of the law and depending on the doctor, he still may have gotten out of it.

But in my opinion, I am certain I could have asked enough questions and pressed hard enough to have shown he was a danger to himself or the community. Any competent crisis worker could have done the same. But even after the commitment, because of laws, he would not have been held very long. This is where we need to change the law and begin to put these people, the most severely mentally ill, locked away for years. A guy like this is not going to be cured. His brain is screwed up. It’s not worth the risk to the rest of us to allow even one of these severally delusional potentially violent individuals walking the streets.

At the very least, a relatively safe place to begin, is if the individual is accepting state money they should not be allowed to dictate their treatment nor dictate their confidentiality. Their treatment doesn’t have to be open to the public, but it should not be illegal to share important information with other family members or other organizations within the community.

And there is virtually no chance of getting high speed from my “telephone provider”.

snip

Thanks to Reid and Pelosi’s planned destruction of the US economy over the past 4 years, I have no economical alternatives.

Del Dolemonte on January 15, 2011 at 4:48 PM

I was in virtually the same position with TV and internet feed, except it was measured in tens of miles between two very small cross-roads villages. That is even though all of their main fiber optic and other cables run right along the northern property boundary.

Then a fellow in the next county set up a business consisting of several wide-spread towers that feed high speed internet to a small antenna on your roof. (I’m 7 miles from the tower that feeds to me). Salvation! After dropping the extra land lines that served as data lines from the local telephone company, and a few other tweaks to the phone service, and then dropping my internet dial-up provider, my cost for high speed internet is essentially the same as it was for dialup. Laptops work wireless anywhere in the house. I now have 1.7 MB/s download, 0.7 MB/s upload, and I can buy faster if I need it.

As a mental health doctor I have a lot of experience with psychotics like Loughner. I find this video not so much creepy but sad. I think his real fear, and I believe it was genuinely real, was that he was about to become homeless as a result of not being able to be a functional part of the college society. I believe I read that he was expellled. For a person like him who knows deep down how difficult it is to get along in the real world this is a rejection that had important consequences. He faced the choice of being homeless or having to go home and admit to his parents his failure as a student, something he may have found intolerable. His anger at this rejection is what probably led him to his murderously acting out his rage. Not some left wing wet dream involving Palin, Rush and the rest of the conservative pantheon.

If I had watched this video by itself, without the context of his other behaviors and the shooting, I’d frankly just assume the guy is exceptionally stupid and/or high and leave it at that. I would have seen this as a very dumb person’s attempt to seem weird and philosophical. I guess I’m jaded or something, but I didn’t find it “chilling” at all. That’s giving him way too much credit.

this individual obviously believed, totally, that he was superior to everyone. The only person that he felt was worthy to converse with him – was himself. And he believed that what he said was so profound that he needed to video it.

The education system that now teaches that nothing is more important than self-esteem, achieved their desired results on this person. Sadly few got in his face and shouted at him, “you are wrong dude!” DD

It isn’t a liberal that is unable to admit fault. That is more of a narcissistic tendency that crosses political boundaries. But he might have felt that he was in a hopeless position and wasn’t ever going to amount to anything in life and so this is how he was going to make his mark on the world.

So if he continued on the path he was on, he felt he would be an anonymous nobody leading a worthless life with no purpose. This was a way to at least gain recognition by the entire world of his existence, even if it still amounts to a life thrown away, at least the entire country now knows his name and knows he exists.

The worst part of it all is that he failed even at his primary goal. He *still* managed not to assassinate his primary target. But he doesn’t seem upset about that at all because actually the assassination *wasn’t* his real goal, his goal was the recognition that the attempt would produce. And that was “mission accomplished” in his mind.

The worst punishment he could receive would be for everyone to simply stop talking about it, for there to be no reporters in the courtroom, and for him to slowly evaporate out of the public consciousness. But it is too late for that. It is all the attention, even this very discussion, that accomplishes his mission. We are talking about him. He won. In cases like this, we should really not even publicize the event because that is what people such as him are after … recognition, even if it is infamy it is the fame they are after. He got it and unfortunately so will many others after him.

this individual obviously believed, totally, that he was superior to everyone.

Not really. Paranoid Schiz’s typically have messianic fantasies. Just because he may have thought he was a god, it would also be likely that he had extremely low self esteem. The grandios delusions are just a way of compensating for the feelings of worthlessness. His smug superior attitude is just a thin cover for his powerful feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

Apparently, Tucson shoot-out survivor J. Eric Fuller has been arrested for “threats” at a townhall meeting in Tucson.

J_Crater on January 15, 2011 at 6:26 PM

It seems that J. Eric is some sort of libtard. He appeared yesterday on a taping of the left’s Democracy Now propaganda show. On that taping he spouted the left’s kookoo idea that Palin et al were responsible for the shooting. Libtards would NEVER do anything like that.

So today while taping an ABC program with noted lefty Christian Anampour he got annoyed with the GOP guest they brought in and the Tea Party guest. His response was to point to a photo of the Tea Party guy and say, “You’re dead!”. That got him arrested for making death threats.

The irony is beautiful. Want to take bets on how much of this story makes it to the evening news?

Yikes.
Anyone read in the Headlines, the Arizona shooting victim charged with threatening tea party leader article? Creepy. The author writes “The irony could not be more pointed, or painful. One of the issues discussed in the town hall meeting was the question of why no police or mental health professionals had ever intervened with Jared Lee Loughner, despite his increasingly bizarre behavior that had included disruptive outbursts.” He is referring to the bizarre behavior of one of the shooting victims who attended a televised Town Hall meeting. Makes you wonder if a 2nd mentally ill person was at Gifford’s event. If so , why?

This is where we need to change the law and begin to put these people, the most severely mentally ill, locked away for years. A guy like this is not going to be cured. His brain is screwed up. It’s not worth the risk to the rest of us to allow even one of these severally delusional potentially violent individuals walking the streets.

JellyToast on January 15, 2011 at 5:18 PM

I agree with you that the committment laws in many states do need to be eased so that people that need help can get it, but I don’t think that this guy was necessarily a hopeless case. With the right type of meds and correct dosage, he may have been able to hold a job and have an almost normal life.

My mom was in the state mental hospital for about 4 years during one episode. The last year they finally found a medication that worked for her and it didn’t take more than a few months before she was stabilized on it and released. She was in a halfway house for a few months, and then was soon able to live on her own.

Today she is doing pretty well. It’s been over 6 years since her last episode. She works part-time and is active in her church. She’s fine unless she goes off her meds.

The last episode was precipitated by her doc changing her meds because he was worried about the possibility of heart arrhythmia (a risk for some types of antipsychotics). However, he did not follow up with her and she sunk into another psychotic episode. The mental health service providers prevented me and the rest of her family for getting her help because of privacy laws even though we knew the she would get better if they switched her back to her meds. They wouldn’t even tell me the name of her doctor so I could inform him of her relapse.

When she was finally commited because of a violent outburst, I was finally able to beg her attending doc to put her back on the original drug and she then began to recover. I was so angry that I wanted to sue the pants off her doc and all the folks at the mental health clinic, but I realized that their hands were tied by the nonsensical mental health laws.

She lost two years of her life because of the lack of common sense in the mental health laws. My husband and I made sure that we talked with my mom and had the proper legal documents to allow us to act as her guardians in case she ever has another relapse. It was not an easy process. And then what does one do for their child if they have just reached the age of majority and they are exhibiting signs of mental illness, but have no prior history? There is no easy solution.

Their treatment doesn’t have to be open to the public, but it should not be illegal to share important information with other family members or other organizations within the community.

JellyToast on January 15, 2011 at 5:18 PM

I’m torn on this last statement because on the one hand, I want to be able to help my mom if she has a relapse. On the other hand, when she is in remission she worries constantly about the stigma of being mentally ill. It’s very hard to get a job when one has a history of mental illness, but at the same time it may be important for an employer to know that info for the safety of the other employees if the individual relapses.

Privacy rights are a huge problem. Surely family members should not be embargoed from getting information about their mentally ill children, parents or siblings. Very sorry to hear about the terrible ordeals some of you have had to endure with your own relatives.

shmendrick on January 15, 2011 at 5:25 PM

Pima Community College does not have student housing or dorms, so your theory about him being anxious at the prospect of homelessness appears to be a non-starter.

Only peripherally through people who worked on various opposition campaigns. Mrs. Federalist was involved in one of those campaigns and was told that this particularly person had been active in Gifford’s campaign.

Just to put the icing on the cake: we now have one of the victims of the shooting, J. Eric Fullers go from media darling to Mr. Invisable. He was in the process of being interviewed about his experience at this tragic event. Fullers went on to spout the lefty meme about it all being Palin et al’s fault. This made him an instant hit with the libtard tv propaganda show Democracy Now.

He was in the process of being taped as part of second show, an ABC news program hosted by Christienne Anampour when he lost it and was arrested for making death threats to a local Tea Party representative. Later he was involuntarily committed to a mental health lockup.

Though I have not found any information on Mr. Fuller’s “non-physical” disability one would presume from the other things that have come out about him that he is service connected for mental health issues.

I want to hasten to say that more than anything else I am saddened by what has happened to him. Having been shot by Loughner seems to be the least of his troubles. I have helped many vets get their service connected status as a result of mental health issues. I feel he was being used by the left wing media for propaganda purposes and he refudiated their whole theme so they apparently have dropped him like a hot potato as he descends back into his own land of demons. I hope he is able to recover his faculties quickly and does not suffer further at the hands of law enforcement or incarceration.

I sympathize with you on your mother. I’m glad she had a good recovery. She’s a success story.
The problem with not institutionalizing the severe mentally ill is that at any time they can choose to stop taking their medications. In fact, in the mental retardation community medication use is frowned upon. Medications are to help people, but then once they level out, the first thing MR agencies want to do is begin to taper and withdraw the medication. That has been my experience.
In mental health, I will have to give them credit, they love medication use. They understand the needs for the MH individual to be on meds, but the problem is they think medications will cure everything. And with the special rights these MH clients have, they don’t have to take their meds if they don’t want to. If an individual is living at home, on his own, who’s going to know whether he’s taking his meds right?
Oh sure, caseworkers will come up with plans… give the individual a med box.. fill it weekly. Some clients need blood work bi-weekly for something like clozril (which I think is a great anti-psychotic drug but very risky. It’s the drug of last choice because when an adverse effect happens, as I understand it, it happens fast, that’s why they need blood work every week to every other week.. but I digress). Anyway, how are you going to make certain an individual who is living on their own is going to be taking their meds properly. Their are some alternatives, like injections. I had clients on Haldol injections quartery, I believe. But you can’t force the injections.

Medications are wonderful. Counseling is a good thing. They still use electric shock treatments here in PA and many love it. But the weakest link to this whole treatment plan is that the individual himself is in charge of it.
In an institutional setting, that can’t happen.

Also, you will still have some severely mentally ill individuals that medications do nothing for. I’ve had clients who were on 55mg of Haldol, large doses of Depakote, Neurontin and 9 other meds and the guy was still hyper and never slept. The psychiatrist told me that the Haldol alone was enough to knock out 5 grown adults for a week! And this man lived in a home within a neighborhood. He had been institutionalized for more most of his life and it was a safe environment for him.. but librards(not you- I do not mean you) with good intentions demanded he live within a the community just like you or I do. This is not the way to handle those who are not in their right minds. It is not good for them, it is not good for us.

The last thing I will say, is, there are always these success stories. like your mom. We had them in the agencies I worked. They will become the star clients within the agencies. They are the clients who are highly functional, had a crash but rebounded with good treatment, they then start speaking out for the agencies, the show up at workshops, do public events, radio interviews and so on, they take on the “face of mental health.” The agency will bend over backwards and do anything for these few “star MH individuals.” They are the paraded as the proof that treatment works. So, because it worked for these few people, it is then proof that it has to work for everyone else. That is the danger! It doesn’t and it can’t! There are severely MH people who will never be cured and no matter how many success stories are paraded around or talked about, there will always be many more who are walking time bombs.

Frankly I would like to have someone sit that rodeo clown sheriff they have running around Pima County down and make him watch this video several times, make him listen to Loughner’s own words several times.

Then see if he has the guts to once again say with a perfectly straight face and in a complete state of denial that vitriol right wing rhetoric, conservative Tea Party hatred, and PA-LIN are what set this nutcase off!